Report: New documents reveal Clintons

Some of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s most private conversations, on issues from her husband’s affair to health care policy, are part of newly published documents revealed in the archives of one of her best friends.

The trove of documents include correspondence, journal entries, memos and interviews from the mid-1970s to about 2000 from one of Clinton’s best friends, political science professor Diane Blair, who died in 2000. While they have been open to the public since 2010, The Washington Free Beacon reported on and published the contents of the files for the first time on Sunday night.

After it was reported that President Bill Clinton had an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, Hillary Clinton called Lewinsky a “narcissistic loony tune” in a phone call with Blair, defending her husband and calling the affair a mistake spurred in part by politics, her own failures and the loneliness of the presidency.

Blair noted that Clinton told her they “tried to manage” Lewinsky after the affair ended but things grew “beyond control.”

In a 1993 entry, Clinton supported single-payer health care at a White House dinner with Blair, calling it “necessary.” The sentiment directly contradicts what presidential candidate Clinton told The New York Times in a 2008 interview, when she told the paper, “You know, I have thought about this, as you might guess, for 15 years and I never seriously considered a single-payer system.”

The archives were donated to the University of Arkansas library after Blair’s death in 2000 by her husband, former Tyson Foods chief counsel Jim Blair, and were made public in 2010. The portrait of Clinton that emerges in the archives shows a “ruthless” and “ambitious” politician, according to the Beacon quoting a 1992 campaign polling memo.